It’s an article of faith among some anarchists and authoritarians that voting is an irrational action. There’s a proof, somewhere, in a book—was it Democracy and Decision by Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky? or was it The Ethics of Voting by Jason Brennan? Brennan somebody—anyway, everyone
[The following came out of an email conversation between Martin Gurri and Adam Gurri that took place January 16–18 of this year. The topic of the conversation was Adam Gurri’s essay What Is Liberal Democracy?] Hey Adam, I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed your
“[M]y hunch is that Western social and political thought may have had the last conceptual revolution it needs,” Richard Rorty wrote. “J.S. Mill’s suggestion that governments devote themselves to optimizing the balance between leaving people’s lives alone and preventing suffering,” he went on, “seems to me
The Great Migration of African Americans from the Jim Crow South was a monumental event in American history. The character of the country as a whole was, arguably, transformed. Volumes have been published on its sweeping impact, but Resisting Segregation by Susan Kaeser tells the story of what happened in
Last spring an all-too familiar and frankly commonplace tragedy sparked a nearly unprecedented, worldwide movement in the protests for racial justice that followed the taped killing of George Floyd. The way people of every race and nationality came together in massive protests, along with the police violence that met them,
Last week following the fascist insurrection at the Capitol Building, Twitter permanently suspended Republican President Donald Trump’s account. The company explained that Trump’s constant false claims of election fraud in 2020 were inciting violence. Some First Amendment advocates, like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), quickly responded with
As Israel enters another round of elections, it seems clear that something is seriously wrong. Over the past two years, Israelis have gone to the polls three times to elect a government. On March 23, 2021, they will do so again. Each time, the government has fallen. This ongoing instability
Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat (better known as the Marquis de Condorcet) was a pioneer in probability theory, a revolutionary, a constitutionalist, and a martyr for the Enlightenment. His life story and tragic death have been the subject of many philosophical and biographical histories. One biography in particular, J. Salwyn Schapiro’s
There was a period during the Trump presidency when it was defensible to believe he was too incompetent and too narrowly self-interested to be any more dangerous than a typical president, even if few would argue he was a typical president. The events of 2020 shattered that optimism, as Trump
In Adam Smith’s second book—An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, popularly known as simply The Wealth of Nations—he asked why almost all countries at the time of writing were poor except for northwest Europe. His answer was in the first line:
New census data has given us a clear picture of the child poverty crisis in America. It found that 1 in 6 children in America are living in poverty, which amounts to nearly one-third of the 38.1 million people living in poverty in the United States. Nearly 12 million
Concentration camps, re-education centers, destruction of cultural and historical institutions, and a repressive state apparatus going after religious believers; this is not a description of a fictional dystopia, but rather of the situation millions of people within Xinjiang face today. One might think that this struggle is limited to Xinjiang